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US stocks climbed higher today (SPY +0.7%), with the SP 500 closing just short of its record high, boosted by gains in financial shares as President Trump moved ahead with deregulation action and by a strong payrolls report.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chief executives of major U.S. companies huddled with President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday and some of them expressed concern about a travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries traveling to the United States.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks climbed on Friday, with the S&P 500 closing just short of a record high, boosted by gains in financial shares as President Donald Trump moved ahead with deregulation action and by a strong payrolls report.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's top banks expect just two rate hikes from the Federal Reserve this year and see only modest risk to the U.S. central bank being pressed into a more aggressive pace of monetary policy tightening, a Reuters poll showed on Friday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin Corp announced on Friday an agreement worth about $8.5 billion for 90 F-35 jets, the lowest price to date for the Pentagon's most expensive program.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. job growth surged more than expected in January as construction firms and retailers ramped up hiring, but wages barely rose, handing the Trump administration both a head start and a challenge as it seeks to boost the economy.

(Reuters) - Hudson's Bay Co has made a takeover approach for retail chain Macy's Inc, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would push the Canadian department store operator deeper into the U.S. market.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Boeing Co has hired a small company to make about 600 3D-printed parts for its Starliner space taxis, meaning key components in the United States manned space program are being built with additive manufacturing.

Rather than be seen to be further enriching the rich, I think central banks will start closing the "free money for financiers" spigots.

Take a quick glance at these charts of the Federal Reserve balance sheet and bank credit in the U.S. Notice what happened to bank credit after the Fed "tapered" and stopped expanding its balance sheet?

Bank credit exploded higher:

Now look at corporate profits:

Once the Fed ended its $3.7 trillion "experiment" of vastly expanding its money-creation and bond-buying in early 2014, what happened to bank credit? Bank credit had expanded by a bit over $1 trillion in the early years of the Fed's quantitative easing, but it really took off after QE3 ended, soaring roughly $2 trillion.

This was the policy goal all along: the Fed would do the heavy lifting to keep credit and the financial markets from imploding, and eventually private-sector credit would expand enough to fuel a self-sustaining recovery.

While measures of employment and production have lofted higher, productivity, profits and wages for the bottom 95% have all stagnated. Is it coincidental than corporate profits began weakening once the Fed's QE3 ended? Perhaps.

How about the stagnation of household median income during the Fed's expansion and the rise ...

Despite Macy's, Saks, and Zappos still carrying Ivanka Trump's fashion lines, it appears Nordstrom has folded to the liberal intelligentisia's "Grab Your Wallet" protests, demanding a boycott of retailers carrying Trump merchandise, as the department store stated today that it will no longer sell Ivanka Trump's eponymous clothing and accessories.

As ABC reports, a spokesperson for the retailer, which has nearly 350 stores under various banners across North America, said

"We've got thousands of brands -- more than 2,000 offered on the site alone,"

"Reviewing their merit and making edits is part of the regular rhythm of our business. Each year we cut about 10 percent and refresh our assortment with about the same amount. In this case, based on the brand's performance we've decided not to buy it for this season."

The decision to no longer carry the line follows a grassroots campaign spearheaded by foes of Donald Trump called "Grab Your Wallet," which called for a boycott of retailers that carried Ivanka Trump or Donald Trump merchandise.

Macy's may have found a suitor at a time when its future alone looks bleak. But an all-out merger with Canada's Hudson's Bay would be difficult financially and won't likely solve the department-store chains' core problems.

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